Personalism and Value-Centered Historicism

CLAES G. RYN, Catholic University of America

There has always been a powerful tendency in Western thought to associate what is real and knowable with what is not only universal but pure of the historical and particular—that is, to associate it with what is abstract. Even philosophers with much to contribute to wisdom have disparaged the particular, creating a prejudice even against the individuality of human beings. Plato, who more than any other thinker generated this fondness for ahistorical universality, is a curious mixture of insight and disdain for concrete individuality. In epistemology, the principle of de individuis nulla scientia—that no knowledge is possible of the individual—has exemplified the same unwillingness to embrace and really take account of concrete human experience.